- 2 keys for the price of one, so you can give a copy to a friend
- Unique bright bronze, silver and gold skins for your ships
- The original soundtrack by Dan and Frank Johansen (my personal favorite extra!)
- A 40 pages artbook pdf by our lead artist, Étienne Vanier!

We're far from out of the woods though, now the big challenge it to get people talking about the game. So please share the store page to your friends and make some noise! :D

Today is quite a big deal for us, as we’re about to launch the public beta to GoD Factory: Wingmen! Please allow me to share a reflection for the occasion.

When Nine Dots Studio was founded, the intent was, among other things, to make games that have a message associated to them, something stronger and more relevant than “beheading aliens by dual-wielding chainsaws is cool” (although let’s be honest, there’s some cool factor there). The thing is, it’s harder to deliver a message without making it feel forced when you don’t have a game based on a narrative experience. Multiplayer games are even trickier to pull off, because player interactions are always a wild card.

So one of the most important pillars behind the game’s design is the necessity for cooperation. To achieve victory, you have to work with your team. In a way, this is the message behind the game and we wanted to convey this message through the game mechanics. This can be observed in the way we designed weapons, abilities, objectives and even the aesthetic. We’ve added as many incentives as we could to make players stick together. We quantify in-game rewards by calculating usefulness rather than going with a simple equation of Kill/Death ratio. In fact, the game’s complexity could either play in our favor or against us depending on whether or not our community members act as mentor to newcomers rather than being hostile to them. We’ve seen what toxic communities are like and we know that they quickly get in the way of a positive experience.

So all in all, a large part of the game’s experience depends on you, the players. We can’t force you to be good to each other, we can only provide incentives. But beyond that, we hope that the game’s message will come through and that cooperation will manifest itself in a more profound way than just game mechanics. We hope that you’ll make friends, that you’ll share positive experiences and that you will learn from each other, because that’s what gaming does best.

Have fun with your squad out there :) and if you want to take part in our community, feel free to join our forum and the Razer Comms GoD Factory official group.

Since November last year, we’ve been into ongoing negotiations with publishers. While we wished we could have done everything by ourselves, we were lacking the funds to guarantee that GoD Factory: Wingmen would live up to the vision we had for it.

I’ve been vocal about my reluctance regarding publishers. I still think that the best route, when it is possible, is to self-publish to ensure that the developers are reaping the rewards of their work. However, what we’ve learned throughout the years is that it’s much easier to be independent when you already have a following behind you. To build a large enough community to support a company takes time, dedication and a bit of luck. We want GoD Factory to reach its audience, and clearly we didn’t have the tool for that, as demonstrated by our kickstarter campaigns. Dealing with a publisher was thus the most viable option to both get the funds to finish the game and reach the audience that would be interested in it.

We’ve declined offers for which we didn’t like the terms, even when large amounts of cash were on the table. The deal we came up with Bandai Namco, quite frankly, is what we would have imagined a best case scenario. They’ve even shown some great support to our cause to reduce crunch time and other bad management practices and tailored part of the agreement around that. We made sure that we were in a win-win situation and ultimately, the biggest winners are our players. We won’t need to go through early access on Steam to reach a polished version of the game. We will have much better means to populate our servers and ensure you have a large user base to play with. We’ll have better means to offer customer support if something goes wrong. The game will get tested by a professional QA department before you get your hands on the finished product.

I wouldn’t have imagined that I would have signed a deal with such a behemoth when I founded the studio three years ago, but I’m very excited by this turn of events and can’t wait to see what’s next for Nine Dots Studio.

After almost two years of work, we've finally attained our beta milestone. This means that we've fully implemented pretty much every feature we planned for the game and now all that is left to do is to polish the game, add feedback and tweaks and minor modifications (except sound effects and music, which we'll hire someone to do as soon as we receive funds (more on that in a future update).

Here's an incomplete list of stuff we added to the game since the last build we made playable during our kickstarter campaign:

<strong>New Traits</strong>
- Bubbles
- Auras (and Negative Auras)

We've added new type of traits that are more beneficial for the whole group. These can have two forms: bubbles or auras. Auras are traits that affect all your allies in a radius surrounding your ship, while bubbles are areas that stay where it was triggered, and any ally flying through it will get the bonus from the trait.

The species abilities were pretty bare bones before. Humans only had decoys that would fly straight, now they have a wide range of behaviors available. You can send a decoy that tails a target, or a decoy that mirrors your action on the X Axis, or even a decoy that you control manually, in a similar fashion to redeemer missiles in Unreal Tournament.

The Chorion barriers also got a lot of new versions, such as a barrier that can be burst into a large beam sent straight forward, damaging anything in its way. There are also barriers that induce negative effects when they explode, or barriers that increase the stats of every ship surrounding them.

Guantris and Ars already had a little more variety, but we added some new variations for both of them as well. For instance, the Ars got teleportation abilities that bring them behind the closest enemy, and Guantris got switches that increase in power every time you use them, for the whole duration of the match.

Optimization programs that grants boosts to both you and your allies, Hacking bots induce negative effects on enemies, stealth systems allows you to become invisible and undetectable on radar or minimap and Sentries are turrets that fire at any target in their sight.

Tons of new stuff here. Chain attacks bounce between targets, mines are left behind and explode on passing enemies, Satellite weapons attack from outside the battlefield, team assualt are weapons that increase in power when you are close to your allies. The special weapons have unique behaviors. The mini is a miniature version of the carrier cannon that needs to be charged for a while before you can shoot (like a charged-up shot from the Mega Buster in Mega Man!). The lashing star is an energy orb that attacks anything getting close to it during its trajectory. Seekers are missiles fired forward that homes in on targets without having to lock-on by yourself, Ares fires SIXTEEN missiles at once and they split among different targets when they can. The Chakram is shoots these huge electrical buzzsaws at the target in weird arcs.

<strong>FXs and other eye candy</strong>
- New FXs for most abilities.
- More FX for Weapons
- Destroyed core instead of just a hole
- Cutscene when entering/leaving dock

The game simply looks much better now that we have unique FX for pretty much every abilities and weapons. It really reinforce their identity and make them easier to recognize for others as well. Also, now when you destroy the core from the inside of the carrier, it leaves a huge, gaping hole in the rear. Finally, you no longer just appear suddenly in the dock when near the area, you get at least a nice fade out after seeing your ship fly inside.

<strong>Progression System</strong>
- Shop
- Part and Player Leveling
- Player Stats Tracking

That part is so important. Now we have a persistent leveling system. It means that whenever you complete a match, you earn exp points and credits to unlock and buy new ship parts. You also increase in rank as you go along, giving access to more and more content and preventing the player from being overloaded with too much different pieces to take into consideration when you assemble your first ships.

The new lobby and game chats are much more functional than before, along with being prettier to look at. You can do many more things in the option menu now, especially grant more control to those who like tweaking their graphic options to get the perfect balance between looks and performance. We also added the Crew Quarters stuff, meaning that you can track your stats. You want to know how much damage you did total? How many times you died? How many times you won? These are all tracked persistently along with many more.

The game is now ready to run on Steam, aside from a few things we need to add such as trading cards and other more advanced features. We also spent a lot of brain juice on balancing everything. There's so much content and obviously it will be an evolving process. The game won't be perfectly balanced at launch (but we'll do what we can to get as close to it as possible). One very interesting part is that now the resistance to different damage attributes vary a lot more. For instance, quicker ship will be less resilient to detonation, while perforation will be a more reliable damage type. Chorions are naturally more resistant to ignition given their nature, while Ar ships are more resistant to distortion given their ability to teleport.

We can't wait to let you try the game and hear your thoughts. We've worked really hard, made no compromise on quality and we're getting closer than ever to a finished product.